PS2

[Neb]

Ok im a PC player I was wondering if you wanted to get the game on PS2 now do you need to find an old school consonle with a HD to play or can you get the game for the new slim version??

[shihei]

need the old fat ones which they don't make anymore. look for refurbished ones.

[Koyangi]

good luck finding an HD, and no, slim cant play it.

[Neb]

Why in the hell is it still supported and being sold if you cant even get the damn console god i hate SE

[Bakthi]

You can't? I walked right into Gamestop and bought one, with a warranty, earlier this year. I'm sure they haven't entirely fallen off the face of the planet just yet. You can still buy a Saturn at some game stores, FFS.

Granted, I was moving my existing HDD (which came with my copy of FFXI) and NIC over, but I'm sure those are not entirely impossible to find either.

[rrynn]

bc if they stopped making expansions for the ps2, they would loose the expansion money + monthly cost from the existing ps2 playerbase who's ps2s havent broken yet or who are playing on ps3 or hording multiple old ps2s/harddrives for when their ps2 breaks. some would swap over to pc/xbox of course, but not everyone would change consols, so they would loose money if they just stopped supporting it all together. in a game with a small to medium sized market share such as this, dropping any portion of your player base from support is not something to be done lightly.

[MaachaQ]

I was told by someone who has a slim PS2 that he hooked up an external US2 harddrive and was able to format it for used as the PS2 HDD. I play on PS3 now myself and still have my fat PS2, so I can't really say for sure though ^^;

Anyway, if you have the game discs to install on a new harddrive (ALL the discs, or the Vana'Diel collection disc they just released), give a USB external drive a try.

[bungiefan]

Why in the hell is it still supported and being sold if you cant even get the damn console god i hate SE

Majority of Japanese players play on PS2.

At last count, model 50000 non-slim PS2s and HDDs are still made and sold in Japan on the PlayStation.com store.

Used non-slim PS2s are still easily found in North America, and some stores sell used HDDs, though possibly missing any discs that came with the HDD.

PS3 has some PS2 backwards compatability, justifying a reprint of the PS2 version since the PS3 opened the market for new PS2 version players. However, Sony's BC programming isn't perfect, and the 08 Collection disc doesn't work properly with current PS3 firmware.

In North America, the PS2 version went out of print when NA HDDs stopped being made, at the end of 2004, but they released as many copies of PS2 expansions as they made HDDs so that the users that did get HDDs could keep playing.

I was told by someone who has a slim PS2 that he hooked up an external US2 harddrive and was able to format it for used as the PS2 HDD. I play on PS3 now myself and still have my fat PS2, so I can't really say for sure though ^^;

Anyway, if you have the game discs to install on a new harddrive (ALL the discs, or the Vana'Diel collection disc they just released), give a USB external drive a try.

USB hard drives are not supported for PS2. The USB ports on PS2s are capped to USB 1.1 data transfer speeds, which is slower than reading off an optical disc. Also, the official HDD is required because all official HDD support scan's for Sony's custom HDD firmware before enabling HDD support, which is why the patch for PS3 is needed to make the PS3's hard drive detectable, it emulates the PS2 drive firmware. Also, all official HDD support is only programmed to look for a hard drive plugeed into the PCMCIA card slot on the model 1x000 series PS2, and the IDE port on the Network Adapter in a model 3x000 and 5x000 series PS2 expansion bay. If USB drives were supported, you'd still see FFXI bundled with a hard drive for sale new on store shelves, and the slim PS2 boxes wouldn't state those models are incompatible with the HDD.